Fellow Open Source engineers, please lend me your ear.
I am submitting this suggestion in the hopes that I can improve
network administration everywhere. Perhaps this suggestion should be
an Internet Draft in hopes of becoming an RFC, but I think I have a
chicken-and-egg problem: if no one has used the idea in an
implementation, the chance that it will be accepted as a standard is
low. So I am trying to break the chicken-and-egg problem by writing
you first. But the whole point is that you may improve Wireshark by
implementing this idea, so it should be a win-win for everyone.
The short version is that I was designing an app where humans might
have to read and write long random numbers. We generally don't want
humans dealing with arbitrary numbers, but sometimes it is necessary,
such as when dealing with low-level networking protocols/tools like
ping (or debugging tools, such as gdb), etc. which I'm sure includes
Wireshark; the problem of these big horrible numbers is only getting
worse with the advent of IPv6 and 64-bit machines.
I thought that it might not be so horrible for humans to read and
write such long arbitrary numbers if they were just encoded in a
readable, spellable, and pronounceable way. So I came up with an
encoding that seems to provide that property as well as having a
reasonable information density: it encodes 16 bits at a time in a
PROnounable QUINTuple of alternating consonants and vowels, so I
called it Proquints. My hope is that tools that read and write
arbitrary numbers, such as IP addresses, will adopt this encoding and
make the world better for everyone. I sincerely hope I can get you to
take a look at it.
The whole thing is free to be used by anyone and I even implemented an
Open Source converter between Proquints and decimal, hex, and dotted
quads, so you can try it out. The essay is here:
http://arXiv.org/html/0901.4016 ; skip to the "Conclusion and
Specification" section if you just want the definition of the
encoding; it is very simple. The open source converter is here:
http://github.com/dsw/proquint/
Here are some examples of IP dotted-quads and their corresponding proquints.
127.0.0.1 lusab-babad
63.84.220.193 gutih-tugad
63.118.7.35 gutuk-bisog
140.98.193.141 mudof-sakat
64.255.6.200 haguz-biram
128.30.52.45 mabiv-gibot
147.67.119.2 natag-lisaf
212.58.253.68 tibup-zujah
216.35.68.215 tobog-higil
216.68.232.21 todah-vobij
198.81.129.136 sinid-makam
12.110.110.204 budov-kuras
Daniel
http://danielwilkerson.com/